It's 2am on Sunday morning in this club night, but Plaid are here to move minds, not feet. The London electronic-music production duo of Andy Turner and Ed Handley first emerged in the mid-90s as part of "intelligent dance music" pioneers Black Dog, and their layered, labyrinthine techno has arguably always suited bedroom consumption more than on the dancefloor.

They have a hard act to follow tonight, as support act Holotronica dish out 3D glasses for the crowd to gawp at their shimmering, cyber-psychedelic CGI projections. When Turner and Handley take the stage to crouch over their laptop screens with the expert, distracted air of Apple store employees, their own amorphous visuals can't help but look old hat by comparison.

Plaid's recent album, Scintilli (it is Latin for "I am many sparks") took their cerebral electronica to ever more rarefied levels, operating at the nexus where experimental composition meets jagged, broken-beat techno. The brittle synthesiser stabs of tracks such as 35 Summers are spasmodically engaging, but Turner and Handley are disconnected presences tonight as their precise music clatters and twitches anxiously around them, a machine without a ghost.

Their previous two albums were soundtrack projects and Plaid may feasibly find this incidental-music route to be the most rewarding. Live, they are best when a throbbing dance pulse cuts through their obsessive noodling, as on Scintilli's standout track, the pulsating floor-filler Unbank. Plaid could do with a few more tunes, but in a dance-music world dominated by the infernal machinations of David Guetta and his ilk, their ferocious musical intelligence is to be lauded.

• This article was amended on 23 January. The original referred to the support act as Hexstatic. This has been corrected.